Most crime dramas don’t even attempt to elevate themselves above their genre. Someone gets killed, suspects abound, the detectives pootle around for a bit, then the culprit is caught and everyone forgets about what they just watched. No harm in that. A select few, however, are so good they break out of their category: the likes of Happy Valley and Line of Duty do have cops collecting clues to try to nail a villain, but are so well made they leave regular crime behind and rise up to mix it with the swankiest prestige dramas.
Then there are the shows that are somewhere in between. Premium genre pieces, you could call them: they stick to the template of sleuthfests that air on weeknights on terrestrial channels at 9pm, and can be enjoyed purely on that level, but they’re pushing at the edges, adding quality where they could easily not bother. Unforgotten is one; in 2024, the first season of writer Mick Ford’s Yorkshire-set series After the Flood was another.
